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August brings a major operational turning for our production. With Rigging, 3D Modeling, and Set Layout officially completed, our teams are actively transitioning into Animation, Blocking, and Texturing. Below is a look of our latest milestones, team highlights, and the steps ahead as we enter our final two months of production. Design (3D and 2D) This month, we’re wrapping up some of our most important 3D designs for our characters, environments, and props. We’ve just begun working on texturing to fully complete our assets and have even started to see some of these designs come to life!  Art by Gaby Chiong In addition to our 3D art, our 2D team is working on solidifying our color scripts and some additional style frames to narrow down the exact style of our film. Once completed, they will be delivered to lighting and compositing so they can start their R&D work to find the best mechanisms and processes to recreate their scenes within Unreal Engine and Nuke.  Art by Olivia Lee Layout
Our 3D Asset Team, Animation Team, and Editor continue working closely to create our film. They have worked their way through set layout and blocking, having completed all of the shots that we saw in our animatic. In addition, our Composers and Sound Designer have been hard at work creating the auditory landscape and we’ve been fortunate to see how they all mesh together in our layout passes. Our screening of the completed layout pass is during the first week of August and we are all really excited to update you on how that went! Rigging Our Rigging team through the collaboration of Adnan Hussain, one of our Directors, and Rashi Sinha, our Rigging Technical Director, have completed all of the rigs needed for our film. For the characters, they were able to use pre-existing Metahumans for the base and adjust and add any controls necessary for the animation team. Specifically, our characters need to be able to perform soccer tricks so we needed to make sure that our characters were able to move fluidly, like a soccer player would. What’s Next: While we’ve met so many amazing milestones this month, we’re excited to continue our push into Post-Production. In August, our lighting team, FX, and Compositing start, and then it’s just 2 more months until our film is completed. We’re so lucky to have many amazing and passionate artists who are in full support of our film and we can’t wait to share it with you. Stay tuned as we work our way through the final section of our film!
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Our CG Production Program is officially halfway through!  3D Asset by Betty Liu Art (3D and 2D) Under the leadership of our Asset Supervisors, Angela Sae-Lam and Ali Daneshgar, our modeling team has started turning our 2D designs into 3D models using Autodesk Maya and Blender. We launched our artists a few weeks ago, using a detailed Modeling Style Guide provided by our Art Leads, and are working closely with the Design team to fine tune details and ensure that the 2D design translates properly into 3D. In addition, our 2D artists have been providing adhoc support whenever more clarity is needed and are working on solidifying our style frames which will be passed off to Lighting. One of the interesting challenges was designing a character made out of glass. We had to consider movement, design and composition, and interactions with various objects in the scene.  3D Art by Yoona Hwang Pre-Vis In order to make sure that our story is properly reflected through the environment, the Asset, Animation, and Edit teams have been collaborating closely. We have been working to solidify processes for file sharing and clear communication pathways so that everyone is in sync and has visibility into progress. While our Asset teams are providing the proxies, low poly, and high poly models, our Animation team has been working on camera placement and Edit has been working on keeping the animatic updated whenever a new render comes in. We’ve also been working closely with one of our Directors, Madison Lin, to understand camera placement and movement throughout our story.  3D Art by Kaylee Tan Production This month has been a great learning experience as we have concluded the Pre-Production phase of our journey and have turned our attention to supporting our Asset, Animation & Lighting, Tech, Music, and Edit teams. Our biggest challenge so far has been creating and solidifying the collaboration process between Asset, Animation & Lighting, and Edit in regards to Layout as this is the first time interdepartmental communication and handoffs have been instrumental. We have built a robust documentation and communication pipeline and will continue to iterate and fine-tune as challenges arise. In addition, we celebrated the addition of 3 more members who have shown interest in supporting our various Production departments. R&D Exploration During this month, our Animation Team, under the guidance of our Animation Supervisor, Ashley Chung, has been exploring different run and walk cycles and soccer tricks. Our two main characters are unique in their composition which makes it more challenging to animate properly. Our Lighting team is just getting started, familiarizing themselves with Unreal Engine and our File Management tool under the leadership of one of our Directors, Adnan Hussain. They have also started experimenting with some stylized lighting scenarios to help push the painterly style we’re aiming for. Music Lastly, we launched our Music team this month! Our two composers, Neel Agrawal and Michael Singh, are working together to create the soundtrack that supports the emotion you’ll encounter throughout the story. We were lucky to bring on team members with strong musical backgrounds and experience with traditional Middle Eastern instruments, such as the Oud. Their process begins by iterating on various designs, motifs, and rhythms to truly develop the proper sound and accurately portray Middle Eastern music. What’s Next Soon, we’ll be officially launching our Animation team which will carry through the rest of the Program. We can’t believe we’re already half way through the program and are excited to head toward the later half of the production. Stay tuned for next month for more progress updates!  Art by Debra Rengga
 Art by Dasom Park We're so excited that we've officially wrapped up our Pre-Production phase!
Story Under the leadership of our Head of Story, Dasom Park, the Story and Edit teams have officially completed our fully timed and picture-locked animatic! Huge congratulations to Dasom, our incredible story artists Debra Rengga and Chelsea Paige Roasa, story revisionists Annie Jerry and Aishwarya Dhulipala, and our editor, Anna Maria Folsom, for bringing this milestone to life. We are so excited to share some of our more treasured beat boards with you and hope you find them as inspiring as we did.
Art by Dasom Park What’s Next
With the help of our character, environment, and surfacing/texturing artists, we are excited to begin Production, starting with the Modeling phase. In addition, we have brought on our Tech, Music, Animation, and Lighting teams to start Research and Development. This brings our crew to a total of 57 people! Our Research and Development consist of two sections. As we are building part of this pipeline from scratch, using unique file storage solutions, we are emphasizing the importance of documentation and clear communication to ensure that our process functions properly to support our artists. Our teams are currently testing the pipes to make sure that file transfers are working properly for our artists. With the help of Production, our Tech team and Directors are working closely with our Discipline Supervisors to make sure the water flows smoothly from the pipes. Our Asset, Animation, and Lighting team are also researching and ideating on ways to create that painterly style for our film using software like Unreal Engine, Nuke, and Houdini.  Art by Sirius Zhao How It Started Early on, we knew we needed to include at least one pitch based on a story from the Middle East. We worked closely, as co-directors, writer and story artist to put together 4 pitches that were stories of resilience and beauty that reflected our team. Our writer, Amir, is Yemeni and pitched a story about Yemen which resonated with the entire cohort, and so it became the story that we chose to move forward with.
Writers’ Room How the Script Evolved: In a world where everyone connects through screens, it’s easy to distance ourselves from what is happening and dissociate from the impact of international current events. This story is influenced by an animator; Haneen, working with children in Gaza and finds itself through the themes of self-empowerment and determination. Through iterations, we find ourselves holding on to pieces of who we were in the past and follow a journey of one’s struggle to find themselves again. Originally, our story centered on embracing persistence in the face of struggle and while we kept the imagination aspect of the story, you’ll find that determination becomes the focal point.
Art by Kevin Zhou Building the Crew Since this is the first time AIA has pursued a CG production, we were blown away to receive 100+ applications to this program. We are working in a 3D style so we needed artists who were strong in out-of-the-box thinking. We leaned on artists who showcased a wide range of skills as well as experience experimenting with FX and objects such as glass and destruction. We also focused on artists who were comfortable with research and development to help build the tools we need to achieve the final look.  Art by Kevin Zhou Updates
We’re excited to be at the last stage of Storyboards and currently onboarding our 3D asset team. It’s been amazing to see all of the work and collaboration our 2D and storyboard teams have been undertaking in order for our story to take place. We hope you join us on this journey. |
AuthorThe Program & Production Team Archives
August 2026
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